The relative impact of countries on global natural resource consumption and ecological degradation

Abstract

Global consumption of natural resources and ecological degradation continues unabated as a result of human activity and economic growth in countries individually and collectively. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly important to determine the countries that are the main drivers of ecological change. This study provides rankings of countries according to their impact on global natural resource consumption and ecological degradation, based on aggregate impact (across categories/variables) and ranking within each category/variable separately. Rankings for impact on resource consumption are based on eight variables in five major categories: energy, marine fisheries, forestry, freshwater and agriculture; rankings for global ecological degradation are based on seven ecological variables in four major categories: biodiversity, carbon emissions, forest losses, agricultural land use change/land degradation. The total ecological impact is based on all 15 variables. The study also ranked countries on each of the natural resource consumption and ecological degradation variables separately. In no individual resource consumption category did countries ranking in the top 20 account for less than 70% of global consumption, and for three ecological degradation variables the top 20 nations account for more than 74% of global ecological degradation. In addition, the study considered how the relative share of global resource consumption and ecological degradation are distributed between and among countries when they are classified by income level. This analysis indicates that the distribution of the impact of global resource consumption and ecological degradation varies considerably with income group.